Following the Great Wild West Adventure, I want to view the routes that I have saved onto the SD card on my Lowrance Elite 4 plotter......

Speaking to Navionics who supply (at a cost) the charts, they don't have a facility to view saved routes/trails etc on their web viewer....suggesting that you have to buy at further expense a planner.....but which one and are there any "free" ones that are any good???

Hello sparerib and Paul, what you need to do is copy the gpx file of your trip from the Lowrance SD card onto your computer. I use Garmin Homeport (which crashes on Macs) Garmin Basecamp, Memorymap and Anquet Outdoor Map Navigator on my computer which all read gpx files but you need to buy or subscribe to maps for these to work but you can either get your track to appear on marine charts or OS maps, whatever you have paid for:

Of course I could not possibly recommend you search BitTorrent sites for free maps as that would expose your computer to all sorts of nasties.

You don't need to have a Lowrance or other GPS unit. There are plenty of Android and iOS apps that will use your phone GPS to create a gpx track. Of course don't expect your phone battery to last long with the GPS running!

Great info thanks Douglas.....my only problem now is there isn't enough room on the Navionics card to save it to(or so the plotter says.....nearly 1.5Gb free !) .....just tried to buy a separate 2Gb micro sd card, the smallest I can find in St Andrews is 16Gb.....my how times have changed, when I bust my first pc all I could afford for ram was 128Mb......now you can get a 128Gb o a usb stick for less than £50....I feel old !!

Times move on and things get cheaper lol, I've got a NAS with 3tb that only cost £110.SD cards are cheap as chips these days, even for a fast read/write card. Well worth investing in.I think most Seni basic PC's come with 8gb of ram and 500gb hdd these days. Quite funny really